Review-based Recommender Systems: A Survey of Approaches, Challenges and Future Perspectives

Recommender systems play a pivotal role in helping users navigate a vast selection of products and services. On online platforms, users have the opportunity to share feedback in various modes, such as numerical ratings, textual reviews, and likes/dislikes. Traditional recommendation systems rely on users’ explicit ratings or implicit interactions (e.g., likes, clicks, shares, and saves) to learn user preferences and item characteristics. Beyond numerical ratings, textual reviews provide insights into users’ fine-grained preferences and item features. Analyzing these reviews is crucial for enhancing the performance and explainability of personalized recommendation results. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the development in review-based recommender systems over recent years, highlighting the importance of reviews in recommender systems, as well as the challenges associated with extracting features from reviews and integrating them into ratings. Specifically, we introduce a classification scheme in terms of both the integration of reviews into recommendation systems and the technical methodology. Additionally, we summarize the state-of-the-art methods, analyzing their unique features, effectiveness, and limitations. The study also presents the various evaluation metrics, comparative analysis, datasets, and real-world applications of review-based recommendation systems. Finally, we propose potential directions for future research, including multi-modal data integration, multi-criteria rating information, and ethical considerations.